I am a newbie and bought a Canon A400 after getting your recommondations here on this board.

I have taken pictures and when I transfer them onto my computer, they are enourmous when I have them at 100 percent. The Canon software I used to descrease the pictures was crude so I just use photoshop now and that does the job well.

But I wanted to know, is there a way to set your digital camera up where whenever you take a picture and then download it to the computer, that it can always be a smaller image instead of the enourmous image I always get. I just wanted to know if there was a way to take out the step to resize images using photoshop and have the downloaded picture be a smaller size?

That is a function of your viewer. I suggest you download the freeware Irfanview at www.irfanview.com. During installation when you set the associations select “Images only”

The first time you use the program go View>Display options>Fit images to window. They will always open within the screen where you don’t have to scroll. Irfanview makes a much better default viewer than Photoshop. It opens almost instantly and has a lot of nice features.

I wonder W6, what you base your recommendation &amp; advice on when you suggest changing resolutions for SafetyFirst. To say it does not affect quality much is very different from what I've learned. e.g. for the resolutions you quote:

2048 x 1536 = 3.1 mp, but to reduce it as you suggest to,

1024 x 768 = 0.768 mp

Thats a mighty reduction in resolution/quality.

Is your advice based on viewing the image on the monitor?

If so that is understandable, you wont notice much difference,

But have you ever tried to print the image? The &lt;1mp image will be hopeless for printing a larger image like A48 x 10.

It is best to always use the highest quality, and least compression for your images.

This is because you'll never know if sometime, somewhere, you may get a great picture from the camera, that you wish to get a good quality larger print.

This is intended to be helpfull, rather than a critism for a new Canon user.

If you're going to shoot at low resolution, sell your higher resolution camera before it deperciates any more and buy a low resolution camera for a lot less money.

Disk space and CD's are both cheap now. I recommend you shoot at the highest resolution available. You can always reduce the size of picture files for e-mailing or viewing on the screen, but someday you may get lucky and take a great one you would like to print in large format and you'll be out of luck. This goes to the difference between snapshots and photography.

Consider copying large filesoff the hard drive onto CD's and archiving them if you need the disk space. Treat them as your "negatives". You can always retrieve them if you develop a scheme to keep track of which pictures are on which CD.

Just download Imageresizer.exe and install. You can now go to a folder using Windows Explorer, right-click on an image (or several images), select "Resize Picture" and get presented with a simple wondow allowing you to resize the picture to standard sizes (1240*876, 860*640, etc.) or a custom size. You can also choose to make a copy of the file so you don't lose the original (with all the detail :-)). It's a great and simple tool. I use it to downsize pictures before e-mailing (you can resize an entire folder at a time).